Here we have a five-minute video that, I think, goes some way towards understanding why the Democrats lost the last Presidential election and have dropped in public approval to the lowest point in several decades. The graph below, which appears in The Liberal Patriot’s post “Why is Democratic Favorability at a 25-year Low?“, shows that both parties have fallen in ratings since 2000,, but as of mid-2025 Democrats have done worse than Republicans. (Note that the latest data might not correspond to this.) But there’s enough unfavorability of “our” party that Democratic strategist David Plouffe argues in today’s NYT that “To win everywhere, Democrats must change everything” (op-ed archived here).
UPDATE: Some more recent data:
After all this, Americans still hate Democrats more than they hate Republicans.
Progressivism really did a number on the Dems. https://t.co/H38mbM7wEp
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@Noahpinion) January 13, 2026
Now I’m no political pundit, but I’m not the only person to suggest that the wokeness of the Democratic party as espoused by its more vocal “progressive” wing is hurting the party as a whole. The implicit call for open borders, the explicit claim that biological sex is simply the way one identifies rather than a physical reality (a stand that conflates gender and reality), and the Kendi-an viewpoint criticized in John McWhorter’s book Woke Racism—all of this seems to me to turn off centrist voters or the more sensible Republicans who aren’t firm MAGA-its.
The video below, which I found on YouTube after someone sent me a clip, instantiates the kind of view that alienates reasonable people. Here we have Dr. Nisha Verma refusing to admit that men cannot get pregnant. She is clearly conflating gender (sex-identification) with biological sex, which involves the ability to produce either large, immobile gametes (females) or small mobile ones (males). Only biological women can get pregnant, for they have the reproductive apparatus evolved to produce eggs and carry fetuses. (Note that removing that apparatus, as during a hysterectomy, does not suddenly change a female into a male).
This is part of a Senate hearing on the safety of abortion medication. AcademyHealth gives Dr. Verma’s credentials this way:
Dr. Nisha Verma is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and complex family planning subspecialist. She currently serves as Senior Advisor for Reproductive Health Policy & Advocacy at ACOG. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Emory University School of Medicine and provides clinical care in Georgia and Maryland. She has testified in front of Congress on the harms of abortion restrictions and currently has a research grant to explore the impact of Georgia’s six-week abortion ban on people with high-risk pregnancies in the state. Dr. Verma has traveled the country training physicians on building evidence-based skills for effective conversations about abortion and has spearheaded ACOG efforts to support physicians and their institutions post-Dobbs.
Take five minutes to hear Verma’s masterpiece of equivocation as Hawley drills into her asking if men can get pregnant. Verma refuses to answer the question with a straightforward “no,” because she doesn’t want to get into trouble by denying that trans-identified women (also known as “trans men”) count as what most people think of as “men”, and thus some “men” can get pregnant. It’s painful to watch Verma squirm and wriggle, all because she wants to equate “identity” with biological reality. Hawley even gives her an opening, referring not just to “men,” but biological men. If you use the biological construal, then of course “men” cannot get pregnant. But Verna still won’t even answer that unambiguous question, accusing Hawley of trying to be “polarizing”. Perhaps he is, but he is on the right side in this exchange.
This question is a byproduct of Hawley trying to emphasize the dangers of medications designed to produce abortion (“abortifacients” like mifepristone and misoprostol). These are generally quite safe, which is why they’re widely prescribed. And, as someone who’s pro-choice, I have no problem with these drugs, and probably agree with Verma on this issue. Hawley is trying, however, to attack her credibility by trying to pin her down on the biological definition of “woman.” She comes off looking ideological rather than “science based.”
Verma would have been much better off had she answered this way:
“If one adheres to the biological definition of ‘woman’ and ‘man,” involving reproductive systems, then no, men cannot get pregnant. Some people believe, however, that biological women who identify as men, called ‘trans men’ or ‘trans-identified women’, also count as ‘men.’ If you have that construal, which is really gender-based and not biology-based, then yes, some people who identify as ‘men’ can get pregnant.”
But she can’t answer that way because even saying this palpable truth is enough to get you deemed a “transphobe” by “progressives”. (I speak here from personal experience.)
I’ll add that self-identification equates to biological reality only when sex is involved. As Rebecca Tuvel found to her dismay, progressives won’t allow you to identify as a member of a race or ethnic group different from your natal group. Nor can you do it with age, or height, or anything else. I am still mysified why equating self-identity with biological reality is possible only when sex is at issue, not age, race, or species.
But I digress. Listen to Verma embarrassing herself below. This is what happens when you equate sex with gender, and I urge fellow scientists not to conflate the terms this way, for the public will not be fooled.
Here are the YouTube notes:
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO): “Can men get pregnant?”
Dr. Nisha Verma: “I’m not really sure what the goal of the question is.”
Hawley: “The goal is just to establish a biological reality. You said just a moment ago that science and evidence should control, not politics. So, let’s test that. Can men get pregnant?”
Dr. Verma: “I take care of people with many identities…I’m also someone here to represent the complex experiences of my patients. I don’t think polarized language or questions serve that goal…
” Hawley: “It is not polarizing to say that there is a scientific difference between men and women…It is not polarizing to say that women are a biological reality and should be treated and protected as such.”Full Senate hearing here: https://www.c-span.org/event/senate-c…
After I wrote this, I asked Emma Hilton if she’d seen the video and of course she had tweeted about it. Emma’s a bit more charitable than I, but is clear-eyed about Verma’s moment in the spotlight. Coincidentally, both of us confected what Verma should have said. I still have no idea if Verma really believes what she says, or is playing to the progressive public.
Thoughts that occur :
Parsimony :
Late Middle English: from Latin parsimonia, parcimonia, from parcere ‘be sparing’.
“Syntactic simplicity, or elegance, measures the number and conciseness of the theory’s basic principles. Ontological simplicity, or parsimony, measures the number of kinds of entities postulated by the theory. One issue concerns how these two forms of simplicity relate to one another. There is also an issue concerning the justification of principles, such as Occam’s Razor, which favor simple theories. ”
Source : https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simplicity/
PS I just found the following, given the ‘post-modern’ mystifications by Dr. Verma, thought I’d add it :
“This is what it means to say that science is socially constructed.” (spoken at 17:28 in this video with references by ‘King Crocoduck’) : https://youtu.be/bxdBRKmPhe4?si=qxiMyEKvQ_9M3o5V
^^this video is going to be interesting to WEIT readers, not sure if it was highlighted before)…
As a libertarian (but not a member of the Libertarian Party, which has gone off the rails over the past four years), I can’t understand why anyone would vote for either major party. That being said, the problem with the Democratic Party, as PCC(e) has pointed out on numerous occasions, is that they are in thrall to their illiberal “progressive” wing which is wildly out of touch with even the center left, let alone the majority of American voters.
The Republicans have a similar problem in Trump. His core base isn’t a majority of the GOP, but it wields considerable power by maintaining cohesion (hopefully that will fall apart when Trump is out of the picture). Trump’s populism leaves the center right and principled conservatives (don’t laugh, they exist) out in the cold.
While I’d love to see a libertarian resurgence, that’s unlikely. What could happen is that a leader willing to throw out the extremists arises in one of the major parties and increases its appeal to the center left and center right. All it would take is the appearance of sanity to win in a landslide.
Or, as I sometimes think on my less optimistic days, we continue with increasing polarization until we end up in a civil war.
On the “big 5” I score between republican and democrat on every measure except personal liberty (which democrats rank near zero) where I score between libertarian and republican. So my vote skews random, I look at the people (with a preference against whoever the teachers’ union likes – my mom, aunts, uncles, cousins, and sisters are all teachers so that is not an uninformed opinion).
The “silent majority” is fiscally liberal, socially conservative. So they have no party. Libertarians are the opposite, just without the number of people supporting them.
I think you are fighting the good fight. It just seems that is the best you will be able to do?
PS.
Labeling any questioners as “slavers” as your dedicated sights tend to do (looking at you Reason.com) does not help the cause.
Why are moderate Dems so terrified of their progressive wing?
Probably because the progressive left has managed to frame extreme policies as simple matters of compassion and basic liberal values: trans rights are the next civil rights battle; DEI is about being sensitive and inclusive; open borders allows growth and opportunities, etc.
And they succeeded because the regressive right was or seemed to be gaining dangerous levels of political power.
There is another Liberal Patriot post in addition to the one linked in this whyevolutionistrue column noting the tendency of the extreme wing to not look for “reform” but to frame things as “defund the police”, “abolish ICE”, etc.
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-bankruptcy-of-the-democrats-elvis
I find Liberal Patriot to be really insightful, and he brings up all kinds of good points!
You’ve been here, Lysander. I’m surprised by your question. In addition to scenes like the one Jerry posted, where a medical doctor either cannot or will not answer the ludicrous question posed by a grandstanding Republican “Can men get pregnant?”… In my opinion, one of the most terrifying things about the “progressives” is how they feed MAGA.
How is the question ludicrous?
Maybe because in most regions of the world most 3yr old kids can answer it?
If this is a genuine question, I’d direct you to Emily’s comment at #13. She more articulately gets at my point. Enjoy your day.
At the moment, the Dems are in Big Trouble. But optics can change. I don’t know what will happen with the mid-terms, other than that the party in power often loses ground. What is helpful is that Republicans are doing their level best to be the most Repugnant Party Ever, so one would think that could only help Democrats. But Democrats are very good at making stupid decisions, and they seem less inclined to play dirty. Unfortunately, playing in the mud works. That huge dip in approval ratings in the above graph?
Meanwhile, Republican strategists are very insightful about finding buttons to push, and boy do they shamelessly push those buttons early and often! Last election, they blew the crazier aspects of transgender rights far out of proportion because it was a strategy that worked. Seriously. On the scale of all the other things going on in the world, that issue should have been microscopic. And now the Republicans have ample opportunities to magnify other issues in the mid-terms even while their Repugnancy is at an all time high.
I think the transition from Romney to Trump is key to understanding what has happened. In my view, what happened is that Romney was treated extremely shabbily by Dems, and because he was too much of a gentleman to respond in kind, many GOP voters decided that they needed someone who would fight back. That’s how we got Trump.
You know, I wouldn’t vote for Romney, but yes I would not have minded if he had ascended to the presidency.
I am continually confounded as to why so many people who have no direct “skin in the game” (sorry) want to die on the hill of conflating trans “reality” with actual biological reality. It doesn’t “erase” trans people to describe biology accurately. But they nonetheless dig in and look the fool, and alienate everyone but their co-fantasists. The progressive left is the biggest gift Trump was ever given.
I saw a sign the other day that said: “We caught the “Woke mind virus” and all we got was empathy and critical thinking skills.” What!?? I had to read it three times to be sure I was seeing it correctly. As if empathy is exclusively the domain of progressives, and not employed by them on a very, very selective basis. But the doozy, of course, is “critical thinking skills”. A classic case of someone claiming the virtue they most lack. I wish I had been able to speak with the person responsible for the sign. I would have asked them to demonstrate some of their “critical thinking skills”.
I saw that ‘meme’ too. Catchy indeed.
Your comment precisely articulated the epistemic magic spell in the ‘meme’/grimoire – and the ‘snapping out of it’ spell-breaking too.
🔮🔨
Very shortly, in a back and forth with them, you would have been called a fascist or some other wildly inaccurate descriptor.
It’s pretty clear that most woke critical thinking is in fact Critical thinking — Frankfurt-school po-mo Critical Social Justice Theory, Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, etc. One’s critical faculties (if any) are constrained to be morally correct.
In my experience, most of the typical “social justice warriors” of the current progressive left are characterized by an adherence to dogma and an agenda, and an aversion to critical reasoned analysis of issues with an openness to evidence and civilized debate. This is what I mean when I say that it is ironic that they claim to have gained “critical thinking skills”.
Sure, some of their nonsense derives from the sort of “Critical” philosophical schools to which you refer. But I doubt that many of these folks, and likely not the sort to put out such a sign, are aware of Foucault et al. Perhaps a few have read Kendi, but IMO that doesn’t support their claim.
This is where the left has come to, ‘mother’ is hate speech. Your move, Democrats.
Either this doctor knows the truth but refuses to admit it because some forces are applying significant pressure or, because her training was ideology-based, she fully believes there is no basis for differentiating the sexes. The former is more likely in her case, and you have to wonder how powerful those forces are to make her humiliate and discredit herself like this, but the latter is also true for our current and recent crop of doctors, therapists, teachers, etc., which should concern everyone. Shutting off critical thinking won’t be limited to this one area. The idea is to “queer” everything.
What about the confirmation hearing for the first black woman in the SCOTUS, Justice Jackson? When asked “what is a woman?” she responded “I don’t know because I am not a biologist”. But then how can she claim to be the first black woman in the SCOTUS? How can she claim to be a woman if she has no idea what a woman is?
Some people are willing to pee all over themselves in public in order to adhere to “the narrative.” Pathetic, and not a winning look.
This is the second time I’ve watched a clip where the Democrats’ stance on transgender ideology has allowed Josh Hawley to look like the smartest person in the room.
I do not think I can forgive them for that.
Dr. Verma’s embarrassing refusal to separate “gender identity” and sex, is in fact, the mainstay of the trans movement.
Their entire ideology rests on conflating the two concepts opportunistically.
+1 It is so simple and obvious to separate “sex” and “gender” but they refuse to do it. Why?
Because “trans is about gender, not sex” is a complete lie.
Trans people are pretending they have changed their sex
This is obvious in everything they do – from males trying to compete in female sports to trying to get their sex changed on official documents.
That’s why I think rational liberals like Jerry need to stop making an accommodation for “gender identity” when discussing trans issues – because it’s just a red herring.
They should be called transsexuals, not transgenders. Especially because you can change your gender at will, allegedly. So you could go from cis to trans and back again.
Exactly and that is key to understanding what much, if not nearly all of its claims are: an appeal to fantasy from which no one can disagree.
Polls are one thing, reality is another.
2025 elections were a major boon for Democrats and a disaster for Republicans. Some major races (including 2 governorships) and a plethora of minor races flipped to Democrats- many in ruby red districts that Trump won by double digits. Also something to consider are the major MAGA acolytes that have jumped ship, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elise Stefanik, Troy Nehls and Jeff Duncan. Key right-leaning influencers like Joe Rogan and Andrew Schultz are also now very critical of Trump. Lastly, Trump won’t be on the ballot in 2026.
I’m not saying this gender bs is helping Dems (and I’m sure it’s hurting), but the Trump regime is such an unmitigated disaster on so many fronts, the trans-rights mishigas is not lending major support to the GOP. I doubt much will change by November on the trans front, but I foresee Trump doubling down on all his failures (tariffs, hawkish foreign policy, ICE). And the Epstein files are still looming…
All that being said, I do worry that Trump will try to upend the midterms. Can’t put anything past that loon.
A thing that concerns me, as a life-long but generally moderate Democrat, is that the Republicans will smartly pivot to a moderate conservative who promotes ideals that I oppose (restrictions on abortion, climate change denial, etc.) but is not stained by Trumpism. A Republican who signals a definite movement away from Trump. That may not happen, but if it does, and especially if the Dems can’t field a moderate, then the Democrats are toast once again.
Nah. It’s a cult of personality. They yearn to fill their Trump-shaped hole, like Trump filled their Reagan-shaped one (and like Kamala filled the Dems’ Obama-shaped one).
Noah Smith (and to a lesser extent, Dr. Coyne) are also selectively representing the polling data.
The same site referenced (RealClearPolitics), features an average of the generic congressional ballot, where Democrats lead by 5. https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/state-of-the-union/generic-congressional-vote
Favorability ≠ voting choice, and Democrats’ lower favorability in the appears to come primarily from much of their base feeling that the party is divided and weak in opposition. It doesn’t mean they don’t prefer them over the Republicans.
Both parties have had to pander to the extreme to be elected, resulting in analogous problems on both sides, notably science-skepticism about results not in line with their ideology. Recently, vaccines on the right. On the left, studies showing benefits of trans-women over cis-women. With respect to the latter, the literature on trans athletes is certainly not as well developed / consistent / settled as vaccines, not surprising given the recency of the phenomenon. Perhaps also relevant that Republican base is not really or only after trans women in sports. Their target is same-sex relations in general. And given they did go after abortion successfully, no reason to think they won’t be successful again. Could contribute to give-no-ground reactions on the left? Speaking as a Canadian who likes our parliamentary system, nor does it help that the American system seems more prone to political manipulation (e.g., gerrymandering, electoral college), which also could contribute to extreme black/white behaviour.
Enforce immigration law, fund police, support Israel against the Islamobarbarian savages, do not destroy our prosperity to reduce global temperature by a tiny amount, and men-cannot-turn-into-women were not extreme positions, they were what some call 80-20 positions because the vast majority supported them in 2024. Thus in 2024 Repubs looked moderate in comparison to the Dems because those were Repub positions and Dems took the opposite positions – open borders, defund police, abandon Israel, no more fossil fuels, and men who say they are women ARE women and must be treated as such in every way..
I didn’t see the US economy destroyed in the Biden efforts to reduce fossil fuel usage.
If it’s not the right wing fearmongering version, then the fight against climate change is far from a 80-20 issue.
The fight against climate change should be a conservative issue – aren’t you supposed to be the stewards of creation? But the greed and desire to own the libs are too strong.
The fight against climate change isn’t a lib-con issue. It’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma. The dominant strategy in PD is to defect — rat out the other prisoner in exchange for a plea bargain — because that is always better for you whether your co-accused in the other cell keeps quiet or rats you out. Only if both prisoners co-operate — keep silent — do both of you go free. But because you have no way to make such a deal binding against one (or both) of you reneging, each is sadly better off ratting the other out. The cost of keeping silent when your co-accused rats you out is that you get hanged. (The payoffs aren’t always so clear. Your friends might arrange to make the stool pigeon regret talking, by murdering him.)
The world is divided into two groups: those who accept the dominant strategy of game theory, defection, and those who believe that unilaterally reducing emissions will shame the rest of the world into following suit when it has every incentive to defect from any international agreement it solemnly pretends to make.
The other difficulty is that the benefits (if any, and science says there will be) of co-operating are deferred far into the future while the economic costs are immediate. It’s as if we are being arm-twisted into deferring present consumption in order to fund our grandchildren’s retirement pensions….even though during our working, high-consuming lives we won’t know if we are even going to have any grandchildren. For all we know, the class of “other people’s grandchildren” is going to include mostly people who are bent on converting us to Islam at the point of a sword. Inflicting climate change on them might be a happy outcome.
Final note: When governments call their citizens greedy, the voters don’t change their wicked ways. They change their government. In this Prisoners’ Dilemma, the prisoners have a say in the rules of the game.
I never claimed that Biden’s efforts (such as they were) to reduce fossil fuel usage destroyed the economy, just that what at least some Dems were pushing in 2024 was radical enough to do that over time. As for conservation of the natural environment being a conservative value, I certainly agree, and that is why I don’t like to see forests and other natural habitats demolished on large scales to put up vast wind and solar farms and the poles and wires infrastructure to connect them to the grid. Here in Australia, prime koala habitats are being flattened to make way for such “green” projects which are nothing of the kind! It is a case of “we had to destroy the environment to save it” sort of thing.
I should add that I consider myself a “classical liberal” which these days some interpret as conservative or right-wing (e.g., supporting freedom of speech is now widely regarded as a “right wing” or even “far right” stance).
Josh Hawley wants to define woman so that he can “protect” us. We don’t need his protection from a safe drug. He asked a gotcha question that she absolutely needed to be prepared to answer in clear language. Now instead of talking about women’s rights to access a safe legal drug, we are talking about transgender issues again. Win: Republicans. Loss: Democrats.
Well, Josh did what any politician would do.
If I had a political opponent who was a Flat Earther, I’d definitely bring that up in every debate to undermine their credibility.
The Democrat embrace of trans nonsense is just as damaging as supporting Flat Earth positions or astrology.
if asking ‘what is a woman’ is a ‘gotcha question’, there is no hope for the left.
As I wrote, she should have answered the question with clear language. No men can’t get pregnant. Back to the topic at hand: Republicans trying to take women’s rights to a safe legal drug away.
But that would have alienated her constituency, which is trans activists. (It’s everyone’s constituency now, because they can destroy anyone.) The doc knew exactly what she was doing. So did Hawley. Women advocating for abortion pills is kind of passé and they are powerless anyway. Trans activists are men, or lesbian women who aren’t numerically likely to get pregnant. They don’t actually care about women who can: to them they are pawns to the greater game.
I’m a life-long Democrat (the far-left version) and I’m really down on the Democratic Party because of how badly they handled the 2024 Presidential election. I believe their mishandling elected Trump. Biden should never have considered running, and they should have held a Convention for the nomination giving Americans the chance to get to know a variety of candidates. I still don’t see a sign of the Party getting it together, so I’m currently not supporting them.
The Democratic party preferred to act undemocratically, and the Republican party now prefers to have a monarch. WTF?
The Democrats chose their two worst candidates (Biden and Harris). Indeed, they were the only ones that would assuredly lose to Trump. Why? The answer is most unclear. There is a conspiracy theory that Biden chose Harris because he knew she would lose. Is the conspiracy theory correct? Most unclear.
I don’t think many people these days stop to consider if what they say is actually true. Even kids. Like lawyers, they train themselves to act as if they believe their own lies. They get to where they want to be through manipulation of minds, including their own. Speech became a means to an end.
Truth as something important is passé; and it’s also much more difficult than feelz, so why bother. Unlike for lawyers, notions of truth and lies are at most only of remote historical interest, like corsets or bellbottoms. They are not lying, just oblivious.
Sufficiently advanced ignorance is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The Democratic side has deeper problems than that of a party being “out of touch.” If only it were not so. “Out of touch” suggests ignorance, perhaps a well-meaning ignorance that could be corrected if members of the “progressive” wing left their echo chamber. No. The problem for the Democrats is that a powerful wing of their party has a principled disregard for majority opinion in favor of its own moral imperatives—and all its politics are moral. Their roots are deep in moral absolutism. They are the heirs of Jerry Falwell and his “Moral Majority” in that regard—despite their pretensions of inheriting the mantle from Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Progressives” are not interested in representative government as many of us understand it; they want not only to dictate our language but also our rules. And they are aided by a spineless and, in many cases, sympathetic party leadership. Show me a single leader in the party with national prominence who has stood up to the “progressive” wing with any consistency. Few besides John Fetterman have stood up at all, and he has received the pariah treatment that Republicans heaped on the latter John McCain. The scorn for anyone who disagrees is part and parcel of a politics in which nothing is negotiable, where compromise is failure, and tolerance immoral.
The Democrats really need to find another lovable womanizer from Hope; that, or they need to get used to seeing a lot of either Vance or Rubio!
Progressives are “the heirs of Jerry Falwell”. I laughed out loud reading that, but it was a joyless laughter because sadly the point is well made. It is a very fair comparison, and I intend to use it as appropriate in the future when discussing this topic with others.
I wish everyone would adopt Jerry’s distinction between sex and gender. All confusion would then disappear. Question: “Can men get pregnant?” Answer: “This is an ambiguous question. The answer is this: Biological men cannot [sex], transgender men can [gender].”
I’m still confused. The only possible kind of man is a biological man, unless AI is way ahead of me. A woman who thinks (because of transgenderism) she’s a man, or wishes she was, is still a woman. So No, transgender men can’t get pregnant, because they aren’t men. They may well be transgender, whatever that is. But they aren’t any kind of man. The confusion does disappear if we call them trans-identified women because women is what they indeed are.
Giving uptake to women who call themselves transgender men is like giving uptake to the trick of transubstantiation. Through hocus pocus (originally, hoc est corpus) the Wonder Bread cut up in the kitchen by the Ladies’ Auxiliary a few minutes ago becomes the body of Christ, not metaphorically but literally, physically, and you’ll go to Hell if you don’t believe it. But it’s not “trans-Jesus”, even if the devout believe it is. It’s just “trans-bread”: bread that’s had hoc est corpus uttered over it.
I would be more confused by your distinction (attributed to Jerry) than I would be if gender was just sent back to grammar school where it belongs. “La plume de ma tante. Le stylo de mon oncle. Le vieux maison est tombé. La vieille arche est tombée.” Then we’d talk about effeminate men and “mannish” women, which is fine. Neither is pejorative and neither would be a therapeutic target of drugs and surgery.
“I still have no idea if Verma really believes what she says, or is playing to the progressive public”.
She’s an obstetrician-gynecologist. If she does believe what she said, she’s not fit for her job.
There was similar idiocy on display earlier this week in the SCOTUS hearing about men competing in women’s sports.
More navel-gazing about the election – but not a single word about disenfranchisement. Just a reminder that Greg Palast asserts that millions of Democrats were illegally erased from swing state voter rolls, and this accounts for the Harris loss.
He made a movie about it (which I just found and haven’t watched yet) here:
Somehow, Biden, Harris, Nancy, and Chuck didn’t notice. Somehow.
A reality of modern American political life is that the media environment has become more polarized and segmented, particularly on the right. This has the consequence that extremist views that can be associated with a political party (i.e. democrats in this case) are now used extremely effectively by the other side to score points and discredit, even when they do not apply to the party attacked.
Because of this systemic change, the democrats need to systemically change how they operate to disassociate themselves from their extremes. An obvious approach would be to start at the primary cycle to encourage more moderate candidates (e.g., ranked choice voting and other methods).